Nuclear/Particle/Astrophysics (NPA) seminar

NPA Seminar: Scott Hertel, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Superfluid 4He as a tool for sub-eV particle physics”

Name: NPA Seminar: Scott Hertel, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Superfluid 4He as a tool for sub-eV particle physics”
Start: 2019-11-07T09:00:00+00:00
End: 2019-11-07T11:00:00+00:00
Location: No location set

Thursday Nov 7, 2019, 9:00 AM → 11:00 AM UTC

Description

I will lay out the promises and challenges of a novel sensor technology, employing superfluid 4He as the active material. We are motivated by the possibility that dark matter may be hiding at low (keV-MeV) mass scales, lighter than the standard WIMP. At these lower masses, the endpoint energy of a nuclear recoil spectrum would be in the meV-eV range, and sensor threshold becomes the single dominating challenge (rather than target mass or radioactive backgrounds). If a sub-eV detector technology could be developed, then it would (even at gram-scale detector scales and even in above-ground environments) immediately probe as-yet-untested parameter space.

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NPA Seminar: Scott Hertel, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Superfluid 4He as a tool for sub-eV particle physics”